


Rise Up

by Ladybug_21



Category: Big Little Lies (TV), Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Character Study, Gen, So Many Lyrical References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-31
Updated: 2019-07-31
Packaged: 2020-07-27 04:42:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20040109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladybug_21/pseuds/Ladybug_21
Summary: It's really not at all surprising that Renata Klein has seenHamiltonfive times and counting.





	Rise Up

**Author's Note:**

> To [paraphrase](https://twitter.com/Lin_Manuel/status/568243453206913024) the inimitable Lin-Manuel Miranda, "I WISH I wrote [_Hamilton_ or _Big Little Lies_]!" But alas, the rights belong to other people. I'm just borrowing their genius because I woke up this morning and had the sudden, very random impulse to write about Renata Klein and musicals.

Renata had always loved musicals, since the day she was old enough to sing along.

Much later, when her flair for drama had become legendary, she would ponder whether her love of musical theater was more of a chicken or an egg in explaining how she had turned out. Either way felt logical to Renata. Her childhood world had felt too small for the rest of her outsized personality to inhabit. Bursting into song at the drop of a hat, wearing outrageous costumes, dancing for no logical reason—_that_ had made sense to her, more than the rest of her poor little life in its poor little existence.

As a kid, she was Little Orphan Annie, standing in the kitchen and shout-singing "It's a Hard-Knock Life." Or Dorothy Gale, singing "Over the Rainbow" with only half of the tunefulness of Judy Garland but twice the heart.

But when Renata informed her dad that she was going to be an actress, he snorted, "So you wanna be poor forever?"

Renata did not. So she re-evaluated her life plans.

College was where Renata refined her taste in musical theater. She sobbed over _Les Misérables _and thoroughly resented that the show made her as overwrought as it did. She discovered Sondheim, and felt like every character she encountered in his works was an old, familiar presence. (Sondheim, she realized, didn’t like writing "nice" characters. Renata greatly appreciated this.) _Evita_, Renata absolutely loved, even if Peronismo was uncomfortably socialist for her staunchly capitalist sensibilities. _Phantom of the Opera_, on the other hand, was the biggest load of Stockholm syndrome garbage she'd ever seen onstage, at least until _Beauty and the Beast_ came along. (But that didn't stop all of the songs from playing on repeat in Renata's head for a week after she saw the show in San Francisco.)

When Gordon got to know her even a little, he told Renata that he was pretty sure she had gone into business just to ensure that she'd have enough capital to fund her musical theater addiction. Renata snorted with laughter, but didn't deny it. For their first formal date, he bought orchestra tickets to _The Lion King_. Afterwards, they strolled along the Embarcadero wrapped in their coats, lights twinkling from across the Bay and Gordon valiantly attempting to sing "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?" He was being ridiculous and adorable, and Renata let him kiss her for the first time, because they both knew that he had played all his cards just right that night.

Being a CEO only enabled Renata's theater-going habits, but motherhood finally slowed them down. For one thing, it was _exhausting_ having a tiny baby, even if the Kleins were able to hire help, and did. But Renata also suddenly found that she wanted to be able _discover_ musicals with Amabella, to share those moments of wonder with her little girl.

"Got us all tickets for a show for your birthday!" Gordon announced one night.

"All three of us?" Renata replied, delighted.

"Yeah. But I'm not telling you which show it is," Gordon winked. "It's a surprise."

Renata was mystified, and very impressed with Gordon. She spent the next month wondering what her husband had planned and getting increasingly excited for whatever lavish Disney production they were going to go see. Until Gordon handed her the tickets as they drove to the theater, and her jaw dropped.

"Oh my god, Gordon, we are _not_ taking Amabella to this!"

"But it's for kids, right? Inspired by _Sesame Street_, which Amabella watches all the time!"

"No, you moron!" Renata snapped. "This is that Tony-winning show with the puppets who sing about racism and porn!"

"Well, I can't help it if they engage in totally false advertising!" Gordon insisted.

(Without anyone scheduled to take care of Amabella for the evening, the Kleins spent Renata's birthday at home, with the birthday girl decidedly irritated. She harbored a perhaps-unfounded grudge against _Avenue Q_ for the next several years.)

Amabella was three when the Kleins headed to New York for a week with Gordon's family. The entire clan rented an enormous house in the Hamptons, where most of the relatives idled away the time reading and watching football and keeping an eye on Amabella as she wandered about. Renata spent most of the vacation pacing about the house, on the phone with her COO over some snafu back at the office. Gordon finally drew her attention back to the East Coast by brandishing theater tickets at her.

"It's supposed to be phenomenal, well worth the hassle of going into the city," he promised.

"Oh, god, if you say so," sighed Renata, resigning herself to an evening of work missed in favor of some corny hip-hop redux of _1776_.

But by the time Renata emerged from the Public Theater later that night, she was so stunned that she forgot to even turn her cell phone back on.

"So?" Gordon asked, looking somewhat smug.

"Yeah," Renata managed finally, pulling out her compact to make sure that her eyeliner hadn't run everywhere as she sobbed through the last half hour of the show. "You did good, Gordon."

Renata talked about nothing besides business, Amabella, and _Hamilton_ for a solid two weeks after returning home. When the original Broadway cast recording dropped on NPR late that summer, Renata downloaded it onto her iPod within the hour and listened to it incessantly for months after. She and Amabella danced to "The Schuyler Sisters" in the living room, laughed themselves silly trying to rap as unbelievably fast as Daveed Diggs in "Guns and Ships," impersonated King George III with their best terrible British accents. Renata still couldn't sing worth a dime, but that didn't stop her from cooing at her daughter, _Dear Amabella, what to say to you? / You have my eyes, you have your father’s name..._

"I'm never gonna escape this show, am I," Gordon pouted as Renata ordered tickets online for her fifth viewing, the evening before Amabella's first day at Otter Bay Elementary.

"Nope, sorry," Renata replied. "Hate to break it to you, hon, but you _married_ Alexander Hamilton."

And Renata truly believed that, in a sense. Look at where she was; look at where she'd started. She'd been that young, scrappy, and hungry nobody, hollering just to be heard. _And now __I'm in the room where it happens,_ she thought to herself,_ writing like I'm running out of time, not throwing away my shot. _Renata hadn't fought a revolutionary war, but she'd blazed her own revolution as a successful female entrepreneur and working mom. _They think me Macbeth_, she realized, glaring at the Madeline Martha Mackenzies of the world: _Ambition is my folly, / I’m a polymath, a pain in the ass, a massive pain... _But suddenly, the obnoxious, arrogant, loudmouth bothers of the world were being lauded for their brashness. About damn time, too. _How lucky we are to be alive right now. _The lyrics became mantras that she repeated over and over to herself.

_Why do you always say what you believe?_  
_Why do you always say what you believe?_  
_ Every proclamation guarantees_  
_ Free ammunition for your enemies..._

Later, Renata would think that maybe part of the problem was that she was _too_ much like Alexander Hamilton for her own good. Always going non-stop, unwilling to take a break, never satisfied. She strode through life knowing history had its eyes on her, and Renata always assumed that that was a good thing. Maybe if she had talked less and smiled more, it wouldn't have been quite so devastating when the hurricane finally hit and her world turned upside down.

Suddenly she wasn't Alexander Hamilton, respected and awe-inspiring and flush with power. Suddenly, Renata was Eliza, humiliated by her husband's extremely public stupidity, unconvinced by her marriage, angrily watching it burn.

"Why the fuck is the second act of that show even a thing?" she grumbled to Madeline one day, in the midst of it all.

"Because unfortunately, history's a thing, and men have always been scumbags," Madeline sighed. "Honestly, I rarely listen as far as 'The Reynolds Pamphlet,' because it's all downhill from there. But you know what, Renata? You are _not_ gonna fucking take this lying down. You are _not_ gonna erase yourself from the narrative. You're not nearly as helpless as all that. Go out there and take back your life."

And Renata knew that Madeline was right. No one was going to teach her how to say goodbye until she herself was damn well ready to leave. They'd all see that Renata Klein had perfect control over who told her story. _You'll be back, like before_, she swore to herself. _You will fight the fight and win the war._

"What comes next, Mommy?" Amabella asked her in a small voice one evening, as Renata cuddled her daughter.

_We stay alive_, Renata thought to herself, thinking about the pending bankruptcy auction. But to Amabella, she said, "We're gonna be like Hamilton, okay? We're gonna rise up."

_When you're living on your knees you..._

"I will be rich again," Renata snarled at that useless, smug Principal Nippal. "I will rise up. I will buy a fucking polar bear for every kid in this school."

_Tell your brother that he's gotta..._

"It's not goodbye here," she insisted to Juliette. "Because we will rise up, and when we do, we will hire you back."

_Tell your sister that she's gotta..._

Alexander Hamilton had a dueling pistol and aimed at the sky like a gentleman. Renata Klein had a baseball bat and struck home like a woman scorned. _Chaos and bloodshed are not the solution; / Don't let them lead you astray_, she thought ironically, slamming the door behind her as she stormed away from her idiot husband and his stupid trains and the wedding ring she had thrown at him and the shattered glass strewn around all of them. Well, maybe some revolution was necessary, at this stage of things. After all, it would be hard for Renata to rise up without ridding herself of the things that were weighing her down.

"Is everything okay?" Amabella asked as Renata sat down on the edge of her bed.

"No, sweetie," Renata said, because she had just sworn that she was done with lies. "But everything _will_ be okay."

Her phone buzzed with a new text message, but Renata chose to ignore it. There still were a million things she hadn't done, but Renata wanted one moment for herself and her daughter before she had to face them all.

"Just you wait, Amabella," she promised, lying down and wrapping her arms around her daughter. "Just you wait."


End file.
